Congratulations to the seniors at Cary Christian School, who are doing a PHENOMENAL job with their senior thesis presentations this year! Designing the posters and programs that advertise and celebrate the event required a few important design techniques that other schools may find helpful when working on similar projects:
- PAPER SIZE: With a 10-day schedule that needed to feature the names and topics of 57 students, selecting the right paper size was essential. The poster is simply three 11×17 pages printed size by side, and the program is printed on 8.5×14 legal paper (rather than the usual 8.5×11) and folded as a trifold.
- HIGH CONTRAST: On the poster, student names are in bold and all-caps while their topics are printed in normal type and capitalization. The programs are similar, except topics are also italicized. The contrast makes the large amount of text much more readable.
- DOT LEADERS: On the poster, we aligned names on the left and topics on the right, with a line of dots in between. (This is the effect that you sometimes see in a table of contents.) This can be done in Word by going to the “Tabs” menu in the “Paragraph” settings and picking the right setting.
- SIMPLE BUT ELEGANT: Overall, the goal was to create something fairly simple (and not expensive to print) that also communicated the elegance and stateliness worthy of the event the posters and programs are celebrating. The programs were designed in black and white to be printed on cream colored paper, and the posters were printed onto foam board. They also look great when printed on regular 11×17 paper and hung on the wall.
- EASY TO UPDATE: Since these were created in Microsoft Word, the initial designs serve as templates that anyone (with or without design skills) can update every year using new names, dates, and topics.
The hardest (and perhaps most important) part? Making sure all the names were spelled correctly! Most families save these kinds of programs for many years to come, and every student deserves a well-designed program that suitably celebrates their hard and impressive work.
*To respect students’ privacy, we didn’t post closeup photos of the poster or the inside of the programs; but send us a message and we’ll be happy to show you a template where you can see the designs in more detail*
